A 28-year-old Belgian said to have masterminded the attacks is thought to have
been killed in a police raid on a flat in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis

Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected ringleader of the Paris terrorist attacks, was killed together with a female suicide bomber in a fearsome police raid in Saint-Denis.

Originally thought to have been in Syria, Abaaoud was holed up in the French capital all along where he was preparing for a second wave of suicide bombings.

The dawn raid on an apartment block in the Saint-Denis area of the city on Wednesday, November 18 was launched after eyewitnesses and mobile phone surveillance suggested Abaaoud was staying there.

A woman believed to be his cousin blew herself up when police stormed a flat in Saint-Denis, and inside were suicide vests, guns and plans for a second attack. Police confirmed on Thursday that Abaaoud's bullet-riddled body was found inside the flat.

The 28-year-old Belgian is linked to a string of previous attacks in France, and police missed a golden opportunity to arrest him earlier this year when they allowed him to escape to Syria. He claims to have been stopped by an official who failed to recognise him.

It was one of a series of missed chances by the French and Belgian security services to foil the Paris atrocities.

One of the suicide bombers, Samy Amimour, was on a watch list of suspected terrorists after attempting to travel to Yemen three years ago, but was able to get back into France from Syria undetected to take part in the attack on the Bataclan concert hall.

Abdelhamid Abaaoud

French officials have also confirmed that America warned them in September that an attack was imminent, though the details were described as “vague”. The previous month, however, a terrorist who was arrested before he could carry out orders from Abaaoud to attack “a concert hall” told police other attacks were imminent.

Abaaoud is reported to have been on a list of targets for French air strikes in Syria since September. He was so ruthless that he recruited his 13-year-old brother Younes, who became Isil's youngest known fighter when he went to Syria in January 2014, to his family's dismay.

Intelligence failures appear to have allowed Abaaoud to act with impunity. He had travelled to Syria in 2013, then returned to Belgium via Greece. He was able to leave Belgium undetected and return to Syria, a round trip he made several other times, he says.

Abaaoud’s family had previously been told that he was dead, but it appears to have been an Isil ruse to throw police off his scent.

At the time, his sister Yasmina said: "We are praying that he really is dead."

As a boy, Abaaoud was described as a happy-go-lucky student who went to one of Brussels’ most prestigious high schools, Saint-Pierre d’Uccle.

Growing up in the Molenbeek district of Brussels he played with Salah Abdeslam, now wanted by police in connection with the Paris attacks. His father Omar, 65, is a shopkeeper there but his mother Badi, 64, is now said to have returned to her native Morocco, heartbroken.

Childhood friends say he smoked a lot of cannabis as a teenager and would steal to pay for his addiction, leading to his expulsion from school.

Five years ago Abaaoud and Salah Abdeslam were jailed for armed robbery, and it was during their time in prison that they became radicalised.

Abaaoud died in this flat in Saint-Denis during a seven-hour police raid Photo: AFP

Abaaoud was the main target of a major police raid on a terrorist cell in Verviers, Belgium, in January in which two jihadists were killed. It was carried out within days of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, though police said the two events were not linked.

In July he was sentenced to 20 years in absentia along with 32 other jihadists. The Belgian cell was said to have been planning a major terrorist attack, including abducting and beheading a prominent law enforcement official and posting a video of it online.

Police believe Abaaoud helped arrange a terrorist attack on an Amsterdam to Paris train on August 21, which was thwarted by four passengers including British businessman Chris Norman. The French newspaper Liberation claimed he was in contact with Ayoub El-Khazzani, the man who opened fire in a carriage of the train before he was overwhelmed by passengers.

Abdelhamid Abaaoud poses for another photo opportunity

He is also thought to have plotted an attack on a church in Paris on April 19, when Sid Ahmed Ghlam, a French IT student, was arrested after shooting himself in the leg. After following a trail of blood to a nearby vehicle, police found a car containing “an arsenal of weapons of war”, according to the French interior ministry.

Ghlam was later charged with the murder of Aurelie Chatelain, a dance instructor who was found inside her own burning car after being shot three times in the head in what police thought was a bungled carjacking.

According to Le Monde, Abaaoud was also in contact with Mehdi Nemmouche, who carried out an attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels on May 24, 2014, killing four people. Analysis of telephone calls is said to have shown the two men spoke in January 2014.

Le Monde also claimed a French jihadist called Reda Hame, who was arrested on August 11, named Abaaoud as the man who had sent him to Europe to carry out a terrorist attack after he had been to Syria and trained for six days in Raqqa, the Isil stronghold.

He said Abaaoud told him to travel via Prague to avoid being detected and gave him a USB stick containing encryption software and 2,000 euros with instructions to hit an “easy” target such as “a concert hall” to ensure the “maximum number of victims”.

Asked whether other attacks were in the pipeline, Hame told police: “All I can say is that this will happen very soon. It was a real factory out there and they will really try to hit France and Europe.”

Bernard Cazeneuve, the French interior minister, said Abaaoud "appears to have been involved in four of six foiled terror attacks in France since the Spring".

We were able to obtain weapons and set up a safe house while we planned to carry out operations against the crusaders

Abdelhamid Abaaoud

Earlier this year Abaaoud boasted in an Isil magazine about masterminding terrorist plots under the noses of the Belgian security services before returning to Syria.

Abaaoud, who used the alias Abu Omar Al-Baljiki, told Dabiq magazine: “I was able to leave … despite being chased after by so many intelligence agencies. All this proves that a Muslim should not fear the bloated image of the crusader intelligence.

“My name and picture were all over the news yet I was able to stay in their homeland, plan operations against them, and leave safely when doing so became necessary.”

He said he and two fellow jihadis travelled to Belgium to “terrorise the crusaders waging war against the Muslims”.

He said: “We faced a number of trials during the journey. We spent months trying to find a way into Europe, and by Allah’s strength, we succeeded in finally making our way to Belgium.

“We were then able to obtain weapons and set up a safe house while we planned to carry out operations against the crusaders.”

Abaaoud said he was stopped during the journey by “an officer” after a picture of him fighting for Isil was published in Belgian media, but the officer “let me go, as he did not see the resemblance,” he said. He did not say when or where he was stopped.

He boasted that he had been able to plan terror attacks against westerners while living in Belgium and being wanted by intelligence agencies when he travelled to Syria in January 2014.

He has been used as a major recruiting tool by Isil to attract other Belgians to the terrorist network.

He enjoyed boasting about his exploits, appearing in an Isil video smiling at the wheel of a pick-up truck taking eight mutilated bodies to a mass grave.